OK, it seems I must flesh out my version of the "Chinese" theory.
The Author and his project
The "Chinese" theory is not mine, really. Jacques Guy entertained it briefly before dismissing it. But it is actually the oldest theory of them all, older than Raphael Mnishowski's "Bacon through Rudolph" guess that got Voynich reeling. It was proposed by Georg Baresch/Jiří Bareš in his 1639 letter to Athanasius Kircher:
- "From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. [...1...] In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts [...2...]. He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany." [tr. by Philip Neal]
The "[...1...]" and "[...2...]" are two details of Baresch's theory that I do
not subscribe to:
- [...1...] = "After all, this thing cannot be for the masses as may be judged from the precautions the author took in order to keep the uneducated ignorant of it."
I don't think that the Author tried to make the books unreadable. (However, he may have disguised the organs in the Biological section as baths in a lame attempt to escape the unwanted kind of attention.)
- [...2...] = "[went to oriental parts] in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value)"
I don't think the VMs was the goal of his trip. In my view, the Author was fairly educated but not necessarily any kind of scholar (professor, physician, alchemist, astrologer etc.) My guess is that he spent a few years in some "oriental parts" as a merchant or some supporting role thereof, like interpreter, pilot, guide, etc.
During that stay he would have acquired a working knowledge of the local
spoken language. I suppose be also met local scholars who showed him their books, which he could see had intriguing illustrations and were said to be full of knowledge that was unknown in Europe. So he felt that he had to take those books back home. (Or maybe even he had been asked by some scholar back home to seek and bring back any such books.)
However, the Author could not read the local script, and did not have the time, patience, or confidence to try to learn it. Therefore, it would be pointless to just acquire copies of those books, or copy them in the local script: he would never be able to read them.
He may have thought of getting some local person (the "Reader") to read them aloud, while he wrote down a translation in Latin or some other language he knew. But that would not have worked either, because the texts were full of specialized terms and contrived grammatical constructions which he did not understand and/or did not know their Latin equivalents. The Reader would have had to spend a lot of time explaining the meaning of those terms and sentences to him, while he figured out some suitable paraphrase in Latin. And the Reader would have had to be a scholar who understood the book, not just anyone who could read the local script.
So his only viable option was to write a phonetic transcription of what the Reader was saying, in the hope that later -- there, or back at home -- he could somehow learn or deduce the meaning of the incomprehensible parts.
However, he found that the alphabets which he knew, Roman or other, were not adequate for this task -- perhaps because the language had tones, or too many distinct phonemes; or perhaps because he felt that it took too long to write. Thus he devised a totally new script that was faster to write and/or was better fitted to the phonetics of the language.
Note that most Voynichese glyphs are combinations of two or three simple strokes from a small repertoire, and the main strokes can be written by pulling the pen, rather than pushing it (which could cause it to snag in the fibers of the paper).
Besides the transcription of the text, he roughly copied some of the illustrations from those books.
So that, in my view, is what the main
contents of the VMS is: a phonetic transcription of several separate "Chinese" books, or parts thereof, in a script invented for the purpose and designed to be quick to write, almost like a You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. scheme (not to be confused with steganography!).
That task probably was broken into several separate seances, over the course of a few years. Possibly dictated by different Readers, and/or written down with somewhat different versions of the script. This may perhaps explain the different "languages" (actually, word frequency distributions) seen in different parts of the VMs.
The Scribe
The Author surely did not write those dictations and copied the figures directly on vellum: it would be a very stupid idea. Instead he must have written those notes on paper, and presumably corrected, edited, and rearranged them still in that medium.
At some point, the final draft of the notes were copied to vellum by one or more Scribes. The Author himself may have been the (single) Scribe. However, I see several bits of evidence, and a few logical arguments, indicating that the Scribe was a separate person.
One argument is that the cost of the vellum demanded a Scribe who could write and draw with very fine traces; but not everyone who could write would have such skill. Moreover, this task was slow, tedious, and mindless work, of the sort that anyone with the means would rather hire out than do himself.
If the Author was not the Scribe, then the Author had to train him/her first, by teaching the letters of the script and having him/her practice by copying them on paper, until the Author was satisfied with his/her accuracy. However, it is my belief that the Scribe did not know the language at all, maybe not even the phonetic values of the letters. I could go over the evidence for this claim in other posts.
On the other hand, the Author gave the Scribe substantial freedom about the figures. The draft may have had only crude sketches of the "nymphs", maybe only squiggles meaning "a human figure goes here". I believe it was the Scribe who choose to draw each human figure as a nymph, put battlements on castle walls, choose the hairdos, dresses, and hats, pharma jars, etc. (Therefore, by the research of Koen and others, it would follow that the Scribe was from Northern Italy; probably from Genoa or Venice, which were big maritime and mercantile powers in that epoch.)
On the other hand, I see evidence that the draft itself had the bridging gallows at the top of some pages, and the one-leg gallows on the leading line of each parag. The Scribe may have contributed only some extra flourishes, like those on f42v.
Again, the Scribe was obviously skilled with the sharpening and handling of the pen, so that his Voynichese writing was fairly clean and firm from the start, in spite of its small scale. I would guess that he/she had substantial previous practice in writing documents in Latin and/or some other language. On the other hand, he/she clearly had practically no artistic skills, and learned to draw nymphs, plants, etc. "on the fly". (However, he/she had drawn goats, bulls, and fishes before, whereas he/she did not know what a lion or a scorpion looked like at all.)
As I wrote before, I don't believe the "many Scribes" claims. I could expand my reasons in other threads. But, for one thing, a single Scribe could be an outsider hired for the task, but he/she could also be a personal secretary, coworker, friend, or relative (e.g. the Author's horny teenage son or little brother); and the clean-copying could have happened while the Author was still in the "distant lands", of after he got back home. Whereas, if there were many Scribes, the possibilities are much more limited: they would have to be hired outsiders, and then the clean-copying is unlikely to have happened locally. And those Scribes would all have to be trained in the script ...
The sections
I think that the Herbal section of the VMs is anomalous, and will discuss it separately. As for the others, I believe that each of them is the transcription of a distinct "Chinese" book, or part thereof. The Author did not compose any of the text himself, and did not invent any of the diagrams.
Based on the clear evolution on the style and skill of the nymph drawings, I would guess that the Cosmo and Zodiac sections were put to vellum at about the same time, and before the Biological section. The Pharma section seem to have been "vellified earlier than Biological one, too. I have no idea about the sequence of the Starred Parags section.
As I wrote elsewhere, I believe that the Herbal section was created last, by copying the drawings of plant parts from the Pharma section and completing each item into a full plant, by adding totally fake details -- possibly made up by the Scribe him/herself. In that process, some details of the Pharma illustration (like the "platform" roots) may have been mis-interpreted by both Author and Scribe. The motivation for this exercise may have been to create a derivative work that could be sold for a higher price, for being formatted like a standard herbal.
However, I see evidence that this "Medieval AI" effort was supervised by the Author himself. I believe that the text of that section is meaningful, although the properties of the plants, presumably listed therein, may have been made up by the Author.
It is unfortunate that the Herbal section has attracted the lion share of VMs studies -- presumably because it is bigger, it is the first one, and gives the impression that it can be the "Rosetta Stone" through the identification of the plants. If my hunch above is correct, that impression is false and much of the effort that went into it has been wasted.
Whereas no one seem to care about Starred Parags section -- which I suspect will turn out o be the true Rosetta Stone. Because I think I know
which "Chinese" book it was copied from...
All the best, --jorge
